We Can Only Hear The Words You Speak
by ElectricApple
Summary: When the man you love is a soldier, you learn to live with a certain constant amount of pain in your life.


When the man you love is a soldier, you learn to live with a certain constant amount of pain in your life. Some mornings, when she wakes to the light of a sunrise and the touch of a warm summer wind, she lies awake for a moment with her eyes closed, revelling in the peace of it all. She knows more than most the price she pays for it. Some nights, after she shuts the shutters and locks the gate, she stands in the grass of the land they've stood in from they were children to when, at a much earlier age than most, they were not, and she searches the horizon for a silhouette. He carries a piece of her heart with her in his breast pocket, and the hole it leaves inside her bleeds with him so far. It was easier in the past, when they didn't have what they have now. It was easier to get lost in her work and her friends and a million other details that seemed so meaningless when he was gone now. Nowadays, even being in her arms is sometimes not close enough, and a thousand, thousand arm-lengths is enough to make her search for shadows.

One morning she wakes up to grey skies, the sound of rain on window sills and the pleasantly rural aroma of wet earth and poached eggs.

Poached eggs?

She shakes free of her blankets and hurls herself down the stairs, her hair wild and swirling around her, her blood singing and throbbing in her throat. She races across the floor of their small house towards that source of hope, only to freeze before she arrives, grabbing at a doorframe to arrest her momentum.

A man is standing in her kitchen, his back to her. He's picking at creamy, steaming yolks in a pan on gas-lit flames, and an assortment of food is laid out around him, an emptied basket lying sideways and forlorn on the counter. He turns from the stove slowly, so slowly it feels as though she's in another of her often-occurring dreams, one from which she'll wake up any moment with his breath on her lips and a weight on her chest. But for all the passionate and beautiful things the man in her dreams does, she rarely remembers his mouth being used to speak.

"Hey."

She stares at him. His forearm is bandaged, the blood still seeping through faintly. He carries a fresh scar across his cheek, running from the bottom of his left ear to the tip of his vaulted cheekbone . The bonfire of his gold eyes has dimmed and waned, she can no longer see the light roar out of them. Still, she thinks, still. Scars, blood, fatigue and all, he's home. She wants to weep and scream and shout, she wants to punch and kick and dance and twirl and fall and be caught, she wants to feel his hands running through her hair and brush against her chest, she wants to attack him with the nearest blunt object and kiss him for an hour.

"Hi."

She moves to stand beside him, and begins to pull out the plates and knives and spoons they'll need. He glances at her once, and she can almost feel his smile as he takes in her unkempt state. She feels a twinge of shame that she quickly banishes, reminding herself that if he wanted to startle her then it's not her fault she appears rightfully startled. Together, they arrange a breakfast full of runny eggs, blood-red sausages, warm bread, freshly picked blueberries, churned butter and chilled milk, the likes of which she hasn't eaten in a month. Alone, it's easier to eat cold oatmeal most days, instead of anything hot and tasty, anything that would remind her of what it's like have him there. She can hardly taste the difference at the moment though, even as she scoops a forkful in her mouth, choosing to fill herself on his presence instead. After the major changes, the reduction of non-scarred surface area, the wound on his arm and the hallowed look in his eyes, she picks out a hundred trivial details that she worries apart in her head with practiced precision. His hair is shorter than when he left, he had it cut recently. His ring is around his neck on a chain and tucked into his shirt instead of on his hand, he was doing something where that would be a hazard. His shirt and slacks are clean and pressed, he's wearing the same clothes as those he had paid to be serviced on the train ride here. His fingers are lightly splotched with ink, he was writing a letter recently.

Suddenly, she realizes he's about to speak, and tenses. She knows he always likes to get the worst part of their reunion over with as soon as possible, and prays she's granted a little longer than last time.

"I'll be here for a couple days. They want me to check out the Aereugo situation next, it's getting a little more heated than the Fuhrer expected."

She tries to wrap her head around his sentence. Aereugo? Heated? Expected? It doesn't matter. Nothing matters but three words that make the sweet tang of berries on her tongue turn to coal.

"A couple days."

She rises stiffly with her plate and nearly throws it into a newly clean sink. She struggles to maintain a semblance of grace, but chooses to abandon the effort and devote her energy to resisting the urge to break the closest fragile object and his arm, together if possible. It isn't fair and she knows it, that she takes this out on him. She should be happy he had argued for the chance to see her for any length of time, however brief, before he was shipped away to the city. She knows it couldn't have been an easy fight to win, even with the privileged access he has to the royal ear. The truth was easy to lay out in her head and examine carefully, but she had always found it difficult to translate her objective analysis to the rest of her body.

"Why are you here then? You should have gone straight there, and wrote another of your lovingly short letters instead," she says, enunciating each progressive word like she's handling increasingly venomous vipers. She finds her mouth has a particularly strong distaste for her mind's reasonings. When she was younger, her parents had constantly fretted about her proclivity to spit fire without care for the people in range. Her mother had held her softly one day, after she'd run up to her room trying not to cry and failing after a morning full of bitter admonishment from her teacher.

"He can't read your mind, my sweet thing. No one can. We can only hear the words you speak, and sometimes you say the most hurtful thing that comes to you."

"But Momma, he was hurtful too! He said that I shouldn't be helping Edward and Al and Millie, and that just because I understood his lectures faster didn't mean that I should be arrogant enough to try and teach it too."

"Oh darling," her mother had sighed knowingly, "then what did you say?" She'd picked at her fingernails behind her mother's neck as she replied.

"That maybe if he would do a better job at explaining things for once, I wouldn't have to do his job for him."

"Winry Rockbell," her mother had exclaimed angrily, "what were you thinking?"

What _is_ she thinking? She picks at her fingernails again, standing still in the silence that her words have cast on them and staring out into the rain from the window. Her mother had been right, as she was about everything. Whenever things didn't go her way, she cast her nets for what to say to cut the nearest bystander where they were most vulnerable, and because she was intelligent and perceptive, she rarely came up empty. He was tired and hurt but instead of resting in the capital barracks before his next tiring and dangerous assignment, he had climbed on a train for who knows how many days so he could cook her breakfast at the crack of dawn. Did she find pride in her ability to be monstrous to the man she loved, a man that showed her just how much he loved her with every moment they were together?

Lost in her torturous angst, she jumps when he sets the glass of milk she had left untouched down beside her. She turns shamefully to face him. She's confused when she notices that his eyes have regained some of their lost heat, she can't fathom why. Regardless, she finds herself begin to curl and burn as they focus on her. He fingers the hem of her night-dress, then explores upwards, tracing an arcing floral pattern. The blood in her veins becomes painfully viscous as his fingers lose themselves in the slacked fabric around her chest, and it excruciates her how gentle they are. She begins to breathe normally again as he disentangles them, but an exhale is paralyzed in her throat as he leans in very close.

"It's time for me to get on your case Win, drink your damn milk. Next time I see you, maybe I won't have so much cloth to play with."

He squeezes her playfully before his eyes spark and set ablaze as he laughs heartily at her gape, and he leaves her clutching the kitchen counter. The beautifully assured sound of it careens her thoughts wildly between domestic abuse and unbridled affection, and she chooses a golden median for action as she jumps on his back and attacks his neck and ears with lips and teeth.

Her mother had been wrong about one thing at least. Somehow, Ed always heard more than the words she said.


End file.
